Top tips for coping on A Level results day

Tomorrow is A Level results day, and if you are anything like me on my results day, you will be panicking and worrying about what to do. Results days can be the best and the worst days all wrapped up into one, with the added distraction of the sceptical media questioning whether exams are getting easier as pass rates get higher and higher.

After working with a number of academy schools helping them to improve their communications and a quick Google search I thought I would compile a quick list of top tips for post-16 students to help you get through your exam day. I found loads of information online, but not one that amalgamated everything together into one place. It might also give schools some ideas on how they can improve their results day communication offering with students at this stressful time of year. Schools could consider producing leaflets, web pages, or even Twitter #hash-tag discussions with students to disseminate this information.

I have gathered these pieces of information from my own experience and from other online resources such as The Student Room and UCAS. Where possible I have also tried to provide direct links to useful online resources to save you from hunting around the web looking for them.

Top tips for A Level results day

1. Get a good night's sleep - Ok, this is technically the day before results day and it is easy for me to say this, but try to get a good night's sleep. Fatigue and stress are never a good combination
2. Be in the country - exam results are revealed in the middle of the British holiday season, but make sure you are around to get your results. If you need advice from your tutors, you need to be able to get to your school to get the best advice
3. Have your UCAS Track details ready by your computer - for those of you who are applying for university, get your details ready in advance of the big morning. Stress + fatigue + frustration at not knowing your log-in details is an even worse start to the day
4. Check your UCAS Track before you leave to collect your results - if your status is up online before you collect your results, whatever the decision you will be prepared to discuss them with your tutor upon arrival
5. Don't worry if your UCAS Track status doesn't update straight away - it is linked to a database system that has thousands of contacts it can take a while to process all of the information
6. Understand your UCAS Track status - there are a number of status options that UCAS Track will display. Make sure you understand all of them and their required steps beforehand. This will help you plan your next move
7. If you have been accepted read this for more advice on what you need to do next
8. If you haven't been accepted read this for more advice about what you need to do next
9. Arrive early to collect your results - try and avoid the queues and the likelihood of prolonging your period of worry and stress. Open your results at the school and do not panic if you haven't got the grades you need. Speak to your tutors who will have the information and advice you need. Missing out on an A Level grade does not necessarily mean missing out on university
10. If you have been accepted into your first choice, make sure you have completed all of your next steps before celebrating too much - get the important tasks done now while it is fresh and exciting before you forget and miss a deadline - then make sure you celebrate your success
11. Getting into uni or another career is the start of a new beginning - no matter what your results are, you are about to embark on a new beginning so always try to look forward and not look back. As long as you have tried your hardest, you should be proud of your achievements
12. It is normal to be nervous! - whatever your results, good or bad, it is certainly not the end of the world, nor is it the end of the hard work you will have to put in. To share a secret, I was disappointed with my A Level results, but I managed to graduate with a First Class Honours degree and now work in my desired field of work
13. If you aren't sure, ask your tutors for some advice - your tutors have been through this every year since the day they started teaching, and experienced it first hand many years before that. Do not be afraid to ask for help from them - they will be preparing information and will already know your situation before you arrive. They are there to help you through every possible process

Whatever happens on that big day day, always remember that your friends and family will always be proud of you and your achievements. Ignore the media criticising the exam process - you have worked very hard for your qualifications - and a couple of journalists I work with regularly recently sat a current GCSE paper and found that the difficulty and stress were similar to the levels they experienced many years ago.

Finally, if you really don't want to talk to a teacher or a parent then please visit this useful online Guardian web chat with a selection of online advisors and other people in similar positions. You might find out that your answer is a simple couple of clicks away.

I hope that this post has given students and teachers alike some food for thought and I look forward to reading comments, and seeing this put into action in the near future.

If schools would like advice on how to improve their communication with any of their key audiences and stakeholders then please visit www.athene-education.co.uk or contact ryan@athene-communications.co.uk

Ryan Hyman (23)
Senior Account Executive
Athene Communications

Can we rebuild the broken trust?

Trust in government and business is declining all over the world. Economic activity in modern society has become increasingly complex and, arguably, lacking in transparency. This has meant that the public has become increasingly suspicious and sceptical. The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer - which gauges public confidence in powerful institutions like government, business and the media around the world - shows that 71% of the general public do not trust the government.

Trust is an important factor for individuals, especially when they are looking to buy into a brand. Trust allows us to rely on others. Trustworthiness, competence and honesty appear to be the most important factors contributing to credibility. Trust is defined by a wide variety of external and internal factors – but it can be improved through effective communication.

It is probably a good idea to cast your mind back to 2006 when the Cadbury’s salmonella outbreak occurred. They kept the outbreak secret for around six months and neglected several principles of communicating in a crisis: be truthful, be quick, and be proactive. Cadbury’s have since recovered from this, but it could have been avoided or limited.

It is certainly not healthy for an organisation, politician or society, even, to have a lack of credibility in the modern public sphere. So how can we go about rebuilding this broken trust?

Trust is developed when behaviour matches expectations. Trust is also related to reputation and ethics, and is crucial to business relationships because almost every business transaction requires a degree of good faith and trust. Being trustworthy generates a range of organisational benefits:

• Improved employee recruitment and retention
• Investor confidence
• Enhanced customer relationships and loyalty
• Increased risk taking and innovation
• Stronger brands.

Public relations and transparent communication is vital in building credibility, relevance, trust and lasting relationships. A good relationship requires a willingness to listen and true public relations is a two-way process. An organisation can gain just as much from listening as it can from gaining positive publicity. Also, being proactive with your communication rather than reactive to criticism is often the best approach to take.

So what are the main principles of maintaining and restoring public trust?

·       Be open and honest in business practices;

·      Openly share truthful information with your audiences;

•  Communicate clearly, precisely and effectively;
•  Be involved with the community; Create forums to encourage dialogue with constituencies

Laura Cristina-Les

Account Executive (intern)

MAPR De Montfort University, Leicester

Why social media?

Social media - the virtual space, where we can share thoughts, experiences, discuss political, economic issues or whatever we want. The world is literally at your fingertips. You simply cannot afford to ignore it.

So how can the opportunities provided by social media be useful for you? The power of social media lies within its opportunity to connect directly with your audience. Also, by using its tools effectively you can save time and money – as most of it is free.

Lisa Buyer, President & CEO of the Buyer Group has said, “social media creates more opportunities for PR people and marketers, it is not killing PR”. In fact, social media, in many ways, empowers communication – providing new ways to talk to your audience, and for them to talk back to you on an even playing field. Social media provides a wealth of information not only for PR practitioners but also for journalists.

Today, society and technology evolve very quickly. Old ideas become obsolete and new competitors with fresh inspiration gain the day. You must be unique and purposeful.  Take a look at the Old Spice YouTube campaign, which was one of the most successful social media campaigns in 2011. More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech. It achieved 40 million video views in a week, and in the last month the sales were up by 107%.

 So, how can your organisation succeed in the space of social media? We have put together 5 top tips to help you achieve this:

1.    Set up your Goals and Objectives: what is it you exactly want to achieve? Do you want to provide customer service? Do you want to drive more people to your website? Do you want to gain meaningful feedback?  Or do you want a combination of all of these? Devise a plan to achieve those goals. Keep your objectives Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely (SMART)!

2.    Research, research and research even more: all the networks have their own characteristics and varying demographics. You need to find the ones that are a good fit for you and for your market as well. Develop a list of social media sites where you can engage with people. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the most popular, but also consider LinkedIn, Google+, blogs and forums.

3.    Join the conversation! You can start joining the conversations by commenting on blogs and forums, answering questions on Yahoo and joining Twitter chats. Evaluate what is working and what is not - then strengthen relationships by attending relevant online events. Why not host your own? Become the platform for discussion and invite others to join you.

4.    Measure results: get familiar with Google Analytics, Hootsuit and Klout. Google Analytics let you see how many people visit your website from your social media platforms.  Hootsuit is the best tool for managing multiple social media platforms; Klout is a good way of measuring how effective your social media efforts are. Also, keep ahead of the conversation by monitoring Twitter trends on Twitterfall.

5.    Analyse and improve: you need to constantly evaluate the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, improve your activities and make all the new findings useful for your business processes.

In the modern age, you cannot afford to ignore social media. It is a powerful space when you have clear objectives – don’t simply join Twitter because everyone else is. Ask yourself what do I want to achieve from this? Where is the best place for me to do this with my target audience? How am I going to make the most of this? Your target audience is a part of this big virtual society, all you need is to use its tools in the right way to be successful in your business.

Laura-Cristina Les

Account Executive (Intern)

MAPR at De Montfort University, Leicester

Where has the common sense gone?

Here we are… 2012, and ethics is still an issue in so many parts of our life.

But why do ethics take such an important place in public relations activities? How can practitioners develop their ethical approach to practice? Do journalists need to co-operate with PR practitioners at all?

Let's start at the beginning, ethical activities boost transparency, which leads to truth, trust and integrity. Consequently the reputation of public relations and your organisation depends on this. With the Leveson inquiry still looming in the background, and stories of the MP’s expenses scandal not too far away, it just goes to show how important transparent communication is in the contemporary public sphere.

Since the importance of transparent communication is becoming ever more apparent, now is the time that we, as responsible public relations practitioners can drive this issue forward and establish meaningful, open and honest dialogue for the organisation’s we represent.

Consider your last piece of poor customer service. From my experience, this tends to stem from an individual telling you that they ‘cannot’ do something. No further explanation. No consideration to your questions or your loyalty. Why was there no apology? Why was there no explanation? Why was there no indication of what they were going to do to resolve my problem? It is often a situation where common sense gets forgotten.

Okay, returning faulty items to a store might be a distance away from your stakeholder communication programme, for example, but it certainly follows a similar philosophy. This is particularly important when communicating in a crisis situation.

1. Be open and honest about success and when things do not go according to plan. Hiding when things go wrong can lead to sceptical analysis of your situation, where a simple explanation may suffice.
2. Always be prepared for the question, ‘why?’ Always find out the cause of the problem and be prepared to explain this openly. If you don’t provide an explanation you also leave yourself open to the wrong information being circulated. Present the facts for criticism, not rumours. If you are investigating the cause of the problem, say so, and issue the results of your findings afterwards.
3. Finally, how are you going to resolve this? Take control of the situation; be open about the way you are going to get back on track. Situation’s such as these aren’t necessarily failures, they are, as Philip Clarke of Tesco has rightly pointed out, opportunities to grow stronger than you were before.

Of course, this is highly condensed, but I hope you get the general idea behind this. For a more detailed look at how to communicate in a crisis I recommend reading the Institute for Public Relations article on this issue. The intention of this post was to give you some food for thought into how common sense can improve transparency in your communication activities.

However, it is important that graduates continue to learn the importance of this issue and maintain this philosophy as they move into employment. It is all too easy to get caught up in the need to gain only positive coverage and forget these principles of common sense. It was certainly reassuring to find that transparency was one of the top priorities for our intern from De Montfort University when she joined us. We will ensure this remains the same when she returns to her studies.

The Problem with Wise Men

They say the problem with wise men is that they are so clever that they see all sides of an issue and can’t make up their minds about anything. 

By that definition, the current Euro crisis must mean I am very wise!  Because I am both bothered and bewildered and given how much time I am spending reading comment and blogs, quite possibly bewitched too.

I can’t make up my mind whether David Cameron’s decision to effectively veto the treaty is a good or a bad thing.

On the one hand it has to be good, as I am a long-standing Euro-sceptic  (that is a sceptic of the long-term feasibility of the Euro, rather than a general sceptic of Europe).  I just don’t understand how you can have a single currency without a single fiscal policy, nor a single fiscal policy without a single tax policy and a single tax policy without single political structures.  In other words, it is fine for a united states of Europe, but not for a group of nation states.  And a group of nation states is still fundamentally what Europe is.

So our decision to keep out of the Euro mess has to be right.  I tend to agree with Boris Johnson that what is happening in Europe is a bit like treating the cancer and destroying the patient.  If the essence of the problem is a restrictive single currency that cannot accommodate the needs of a heterogeneous group of states, then yet more integration seems to be compounding the error.

Great, so I do approve.    Well done Prime Minister!

Ah, but.

How can it be good for us to be so absolutely marginalised in Europe?  It is all very well sticking up for the interests of the City (I think), but if we are outside a tightly integrated Euro-zone and have no influence over its decision making, then the future looks bleak indeed?  Surely that group will make it very difficult for international companies located in London to do business within their zone.  London will not be a place from which you can do financial business in Europe – do you stick with a market of 60 million or opt to locate within a market of 300 million?

And so my conclusion???

Bad night’s work, Mr Cameron.  You were right to keep us out of an ever more tightly integrated Europe, but surely, somehow we could have done this without alienating everyone?  Splendid isolation was fine when we had an ‘splendid’ empire, but now we are just isolated. 

Even a wise man can see that can't be good.

The Athene Debate - The Motion: Newspapers have crossed the moral and legal line

Friday 11^th November 2011

This is just a quick note to thank those who took part and attended our inaugural debate.  It was a thoroughly interesting, thought-provoking and robust evening with our four speakers putting across their views on a topic that has brought scandal to the newspaper industry since the summer.

The debate took place in the week which saw allegations of widespread surveillance conducted by the News of the World ranging from the Royal Family to, as our chair Stewart Francis pointed out, Richard Madeley.  It also saw the return of the younger Murdoch to the House of Commons to be lightly toasted by a committee of eager MPs.

The debate began with a vote on the motion and the overwhelming response from the audience was that newspapers had indeed overstepped the mark on both counts.

To propose the motion – Richard Astle, MD of Athene Communications argued that it was simply fact that newspapers had crossed the legal line, unless the law didn’t apply to them at all.  He went on to state that it didn’t matter if the exposure of Gordon Brown’s son’s illness was against the law, in a sense it didn’t matter how the information was obtained, as people’s grief had to remain private and that time and time again newspapers cross the moral line. 

Mark Edwards, the editor of the Peterborough Evening Telegraph simply wouldn’t defend the actions of the NOTW, but he made it clear that not every newspaper would do this or know how to do this (as he raised a Nokia from the early 2000s above his head!).    He went on to say that the phone-hacking scandal had been exposed by the media itself and in effect the industry had regulated itself.  His closing remarks centred on the point that every newspaper is governed by their own readers.

Peter Facey, Director of Unlocked Democracy, said that regulation was needed as the Press Complaints Commission didn’t work and this had been shown with their lacklustre response to the scandal.  He argued that the NOTW broke the law to make money – and their actions were dangerous as News International had become so powerful it became a law unto itself. Regulation became the key topic and Peter stated that someone needed to keep an eye on the journalists as journalists keep their eye on politicians.  He passionately defended the need for a free press – but that we needed one that was fair and that doesn’t turn people into victims.

Last to speak was Express journalist Sarah O’Grady who brushed aside previous arguments and said that more regulation would harm the industry and the UK’s free press.  She argued that phone-hacking had not harmed anyone and the response to the scandal was out of proportion.  She then asked why it was the industry’s job to hold the moral high ground?  Finishing with a positive note on the effectiveness of self-regulation and that the readers should be in control, and they use that control when they arrive at the newsagents every morning.

The floor was then opened up to guests for the next forty minutes as the debate spilled into the assembled audience who held the full gambit of opinion on the topic.  Points were raised about the regulation of the newspaper industry and how and if it should change.  Many felt that the NOTW’s closure was regulation enough and that stricter measures could undermine newspapers’ ability to scrutinise all aspects of society.  Others felt that the industry had simply gotten away with it, that penalties for law-breaking were not strict enough and that malpractice was endemic throughout the tabloid press.

The final vote did not change the initial feeling but there was a swing in favour of those defending the motion.  As the chair mentioned, if the question had been based more on regulation of newspapers then the result would probably have been a lot tighter.

Lots of positive responses from all and then the debate seemed to start all over again in the bar!

Until next time… future topics are very much welcomed.

Steve Titman, Athene Communications
November 15 2011

Trick or treat?

Something is sitting a little uneasily with me.

It’s not the state of the economy, the Eurozone crisis, or indeed the hottest topic in the PR world - whether PR agencies should pay their interns! (We do by the way). No, the thing that’s worrying me is Halloween.

Yes, yes I know it’s not the biggest thing in the universe but you see I’ve succumbed. Having seen all about Halloween on Peppa Pig (or some such programme), my nearly-three year old wanted a pumpkin. This was fine and provided a fun activity for her to do with granddad at the weekend. Then it was a costume and then a lantern and then a mask and then a party – yes, a Halloween party! It’s not her birthday, I can’t merge the two things together. No, this required an independent party.

So, that is how I found myself knee deep in Haribo sweets and two year olds dressed as ghosts.

“I will never let a child of mine celebrate Halloween” I had said.

I also promised I wouldn’t use sweets as bribery to quash a tantrum in the supermarket, I wouldn’t use the TV as a babysitter, I’d never lose my temper and instead offer reasoned argument to tame my two year old. I’d always cook everything fresh and from scratch (and preferably organic); I’d certainly never take her to fast food restaurants and never, but never would I let her sleep when she should be awake just so I could sit down with a nice cup of tea for a quiet five minutes.

I’m fairly sure that the PR industry will somehow be to blame for the fact that we now celebrate everything from Halloween to sausages.

I am even certain that at some point in my career I have made up a celebration day or week to provide the material for a desperately needed media campaign or product launch. So, I have to take my share of the blame for the exhausting round of celebrations we now find ourselves a part of.

But I need to make a stand. I am declaring the 1^st November every year ‘Celebrate Nothing’ day – there’ll be no bringing daughters, grannies or bikes to work for the day. There’ll be no appreciating potatoes or sausages required. There’ll be no fancy dress and no crackers and I promise you will not be required to throw a party.

Now, where’s my broomstick?